Penguin Modern Classics

This semi-autobiographical tale of Kerouac's own trip to France, to trace his ancestors and explore his own understanding of the Buddhism that came to define his beliefs, contains some of Kerouac's most lyrical descriptions. From his reports of the strangers he meets and the all-night conversations he enjoys in seedy bars in Paris and Brittany, to the moment in a cab he experiences Buddhism's satori - a feeling of sudden awakening - Kerouac's affecting and revolutionary writing transports the reader.

Published at the height of his fame, Satori in Paris is a hectic tale of philosophy, identity and the powerful strangeness of travel.

The Subterraneans haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on a diet of booze and benzedrine, Proust and Verlaine. Living amongst them is Leo, an aspiring writer, and Mardou, half-Indian, half-Negro, beautiful and neurotic. Their bittersweet and ill-starred love affair sees Kerouac at his most evocative. Many regard this as being Kerouac's most touching and tender book.

When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. At the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the doomed Starkadders: cousin Judith, heaving with remorse for unspoken wickedness; Amos, preaching fire and damnation; their sons, lustful Seth and despairing Reuben; child of nature, Elfine; and crazed old Aunt Ada Doom, who has kept to her bedroom for the last twenty years. But Flora loves nothing better than to organize other people. Armed with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the family in hand. A hilarious and merciless parody of rural melodramas, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is one of the best-loved comic novels of all time.

A reissue of the Penguin Modern Classics edition, this collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.

Gilgi knows where she's going in life: she's ambitious, determined and fearless. She's not even derailed when her parents drop a massive bombshell on her twenty-first birthday. But then she meets the charming but aimless Martin, and for the first time, Gilgi finds herself blown bewilderingly and dangerously off-course. Set in Cologne against the backdrop of rising Nazism, Irmgard Keun's astonishing debut electrified Weimar Germany. With its frank exploration of sex, abortion, work and love, it feels as fresh today as when it first appeared.

'Stimulating, elegant and pugnacious' Observer

In this highly acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering Orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation - a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the 'otherness' of eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval, Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West's romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. Drawing on his own experiences as an Arab Palestinian living in the West, Said examines how these ideas can be a reflection of European imperialism and racism.

'She found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold ... She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world'

Like the clay from which she sculpts figurines as a girl, Virginia is constantly shifting and changing. From her dreamlike childhood on Quiet Farm with her adored brother Daniel, through an adulthood where the past continues to pull her back and shape her, she moves through life, grasping for the truth of existence. Illuminating Virginia's progress through intense flashes of image, sensation and perception, The Chandelier, Lispector's landmark second novel, is a disorienting and exhilarating portrait of one woman's inner life.

"Sentence by sentence, page by page, Bellow is simply the best writer we have." -The New York Times Book Review

In It All Adds Up, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow takes readers on a brilliantly insightful journey through literary America over a forty-year period. In sentence after sentence, page after page, readers are offered brilliant perceptions and unusual insights into everyday life in America and the life of the mind. Moving from political figures like Roosevelt and Khrushchev to artists like Mozart, Dostoevsky, and John Cheever, from New York and Chicago to Paris-and including the deeply personal "Autobiography of Ideas"-Bellow, with great humor and wisdom, records the enduring thoughts and opinions of a lifetime of observation, thoughts that speak to us with renewed energy for our times.

'Black women were equal to their men in the oppression they suffered; they were their men's social equals within the slave community; and they resisted slavery with a passion equal to their men's'

Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this seminal history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation. Tracing the intertwined histories of the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, Davis examines the racism and class prejudice inherent in so much of white feminism, and in doing so brings to light new pioneering heroines, from field slaves to mill workers, who fought back and refused to accept the lives into which they were born.

Life in Tove's neighbourhood in Copenhagen is confusing and difficult: her father can't find work, her mother is angry and remote, and Tove herself sometimes thinks she's been exchanged at birth. But 'inside of me long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul' and she soon realizes that she has a vocation, something unknowable and secret within, and that if she can only find the right words, she will one day succeed in forging a true life of her own - somewhere beyond the narrow streets of her childhood.

The first volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy, Childhood captures the triumphs and tragedies of girlhood with intense vividness and a poet's clarity of vision.

Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet and wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, but she has no idea of the struggles that lie ahead - love affairs, an unwanted pregnancy, physical pain and crippling opioid addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living life freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms.

The final volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy and perhaps her masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.

'I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop'

Guy Roland, a private detective in Paris, is trying to solve the mystery of his own past. His memories erased by amnesia, he has no idea where he is from, or even his real name. As he searches for clues through the city's shadowy streets and smoky bars, latching on to strangers, accumulating mementoes, photographs, scraps and stories, he starts to piece together the events that brought him here, all leading back to the murky days of wartime occupation.

Patrick Modiano's portrait of a man obsessively hunting for his lost identity is an intoxicating noir masterpiece; a meditation on who we are and how we forget.

Unable to stay on to high school, Tove starts her first job (which lasts only one day) and soon embarks on a varied and chequered career: as au pair, cleaner, stock-room assistant and office worker. But Tove is hungry, for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As she navigates exploitative bosses, uninspiring boyfriends and a Nazi landlady, she struggles to keep her poetic vocation in sight - until she finally realizes the 'miracle' that she has always dreamed of.

The second volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy, Youth is a sensitive, often funny and almost painfully truthful portrayal of adolescence.

April 1945, the last days of the Nazi regime. While bombs are falling on Berlin, the Gestapo are still searching for traitors, resistance fighters and deserters. People mistrust each other more than ever. Everyone could be a spy.

In the midst of chaos, the young soldier Joachim Lassehn desperately wants to escape. Friedrich Wiegand, a trade unionist tortured in a concentration camp, tries to speed up the end of the war through sabotage. Doctor Walter Böttcher helps refugees to survive. And Oskar Klose's pub is the conspiratorial meeting point of a small resistance group that the SS is trying to trace. Weaving together their stories, Heinz Rein offers an unforgettable portrait of life in a city devastated by war.

Unsettling, raw and cinematic, Berlin Finale was published in Germany in 1947 and quickly became a bestseller. Newly translated eighty years later, it is ripe for rediscovery.

Written in flight from Lispector's 'shipwreck of introspection' it is a book unlike any other in the Lispector canon, a novel about simply seeing the external world. Its heroine Lucrécia is utterly mute and unreflective. She may have no inner life. The plot itself is utterly unlike any other Lispector narrative: small-town girl marries rich man, sees the world, and lives happily ever after.

But there are miraculous horses, linguistic ecstasies, catty remarks, minor characters' visions and music from unknown sources. There is Lucrécia, the heroine free of the burden of thought, who 'leaned over without any individuality, trying merely to look at things directly'. And yet her 'mere' looking leads, as Lispector's biographer Benjamin Moser notes, 'paradoxically but inevitably, to Clarice's own metaphysical concerns. As it turns out, not being profound is simply another way of being profound'.

Translated by Johnny Lorenz